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How-To Geek

Looks like having a GameBoy emulator in your browser is going to actually happen at some point—a very basic, unfinished version is available in source code form already. It’s a very technical read, but the important part is that we’re going to have GameBoy emulators in our browser!

Nintendo’s internal name for the GameBoy is “Dot Matrix Game”; its display is a pixel LCD of dimensions 160×144. If each pixel in the LCD is treated as a pixel in a HTML5 , a direct mapping can be made to a canvas of width 160 and height 144. In order to directly address each pixel in the LCD, the contents of the canvas can be manipulated as a “framebuffer”: a single block of memory containing the entirety of the canvas, as a series of 4-byte RGBA values.